On literary merit Colm Tóibín's 'The Master' should take this year's Booker prize, argues Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent.
First, the good news. The Booker panel of judges yesterday shortlisted a truly fine novel that endorses fiction writing as an art. Last month they had produced a predominantly English and therefore domestic, longlist dominated by surprise choices, first and second novels, some crude airport reads, a couple of quality fallers, as well as the hotly tipped but overrated Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and veteran Shirley Hazzard's outstanding National Book Award winning, The Great Fire,
The Irish writer, Colm Tóibín has earned his second Booker shortlisting with The Master. It is his fifth novel, which not only achieves a memorable, profound and often moving portrait of the inner life of the master, the great Henry James; it is a celebration of formal prose.
The inclusion of Tóibín's book, almost, but not quite compensates for a serious omission - that of another Irish writer, Ronan Bennett, whose Havoc in Its Third Year, a study of a society suspended by fear and paranoia, set in 17th- century Puritan England. As with Tóibín, Bennett not only told a powerful story, he wrote it with grace and formal elegance. It is no overstatement to comment that of the 22 longlisted titles, the two Irish writers, offering original and non- Irish themed books, shared the honours for superlative prose writing.
It must also be said that neither Tóibín, nor Bennett, needed Booker long- or shortlisting. Both novels have impressed and both will be read. Yet every Booker shortlist benefits from the presence of an urgently political book, and Bennett's is certainly that. Havoc in Its Third Year says pretty much all that is needed to be said on the sad theme of man as hunter and hunted.
If may seem that if Tóibín is the good news, then Bennett's exclusion offers the bad tidings. But his loss is only part of what adds up to another Booker shortlist of compromise and lost opportunity. His novel will not suffer and has already been recognised as a work as valuable as Arthur Miller's play, The Crucible, was in an earlier era of paranoia and injustice.
But the panel made other mistakes. There was the omission of the young Nigerian Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose debut Purple Hibiscus was expectedly longlisted but failed to make the final six. Like Bennett's, it is a novel with a political message, offering valuable insights into a society blighted by poverty and oppression, the clash of traditional values and Westernised corruption. She too explored the meaningless of religion when it is used as a weapon by bullies. Admittedly her novel, in which a young girl recalled life in a household terrified by her wealthy businessman father (evoking images of a community living in fear of politically corrupt masters), is hampered by an underlying sentimentality. But the simplicity and candour of the narrative does beguile. It is a charming performance which will have benefited from the Booker exposure.
The third of the most obviously political books to fail to make the shortlist, is a brave and courageous book that seriously deserved a shortlisting. Maps for Lost Lovers by the London-based Pakastani writer Nadeem Aslam is a beautiful work, almost a romance, that brilliantly deals with the sheer ugliness of its major themes, racism in contemporary England and the breathtaking traditional cruelty to women that endures in the Muslim faith. Unlike Salman Rushdie, Aslam does not play tricks, and ensures his message is clear without reducing his novel to a polemic. This is a book with a great deal to say: it needed, and deserved, a shortlisting.
Instead, the token political banner has been left to be carried by South Africa's Achmat Dangor's Bitter Fruit. Published in 2001 and shortlisted for the 2003 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, this is a novel that is politically important rather than artistically outstanding. As a study of post-apartheid South Africa, it suffers by comparison with finer novels by better writers. This is a passionate, often hysterical book of strained prose and wild dialogue. It is raw and jagged and dominated by heated relationships. Dangor writes from the heart, but this is a novel of shouting and screaming and too much of its stylistic uneveness, including flat characterisation, is excused by the importance of the political story simmering in the background.
Sarah Hall's Electric Michelangelo is her second novel and follows her debut Haweswater which was published in 2002. Born in 1974, she is the youngest contender and her narrative, which opens in England and moves to the US, is lively and owes some of its inspiration to the subversive zeal of the late Angela Carter. Certainly, its show-bizzy energy sets is apart and it is satisfying to see it on the shortlist in place of say, Nicola Barker's showily vapid Clear, a Transparent Novel. But there were several books with greater claims.
One of the year's most assured debuts was that of Justin Haythe, whose beautifully ironic and gracious The Honeymoon with its echoes of Ford Maddox Ford, Somerset Maugham and Henry James might well have been lost to many readers had it not been longlisted. But such are its subtle gifts, it would have been an inspired selection by a panel whose combined tastes seemed dangerously diverse and clearly faltered over the final six. Also beautiful was an elegant period piece, Sixty Lights by the Australian Gail Jones. Wearing its honourable shades of Peter Carey, it is a novel well worth seeking out.
Most critics expected Alan Hollinghurst, a Booker runner-up in 1994, to make the final half dozen as soon as The Line of Beauty featured on the longlist. And so he has. He is a sensitive, humane reader of relationships, and a diligent writer of calm, emotional set pieces, but there invariably lingers about his lengthy fiction a feeling of having already read it. With each novel, and this is his fourth, there is an oppressive sense of "Let's have another look at vulnerable, intimate gay relationships in contemporary Britain set against a canvas of British politics". Here is England in the 1980s, and Hollinghurst appears caught by a theme that simply will not release him.
It does no injustice to Hollinghurst or Hall, neither of whom write as convincingly as Bennett, to argue that had only the judges decided to omit either of them in order to include this year's revelation of the longlist - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - one of the most exciting, original and entertaining narratives by an English writer. Susanna Clarke's debut is billed as a fantasy novel and admittedly it is about the revival of English magic, but it looks as much to Dickens as it does to Tolkien and Peake.
Here is a huge book that is eccentric, funny and written in a formal literate prose that is a delight to experience. Although it is not published until the end of this month, it has already captivated US readers and it is a shame that the judges failed to select this witty and compulsive tour de force.
Even on its publication last March I was disappointed with David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. Possibly because his previous novel, number9dream was so good, it was fair to expect big things of this, his third book. Instead it never seemed to get beyond big, and big it is - at 529 pages it is even longer than The Line of Beauty.
But Mitchell, who is a novelist of voices, has not crafted a sustained narrative. Instead the novel consists of several independent narratives that are run together to form a whole that is created by an interlinking device. The sequences unfold, each handing on to the next as if in a relay race only to work their way back to the beginning.
Such technofiction has its moments, but ultimately it leaves an empty feeling of merely having witnessed a writer having lots of fun - all by himself. It is a haphazard, overly whimsical performance that is so intent on subverting conventional conventional fiction, it ends up subverting itself. Ho hum, it will probably win unless art does, which means Colm Tóibíwill carry the day (as it should).
Last but not least is Gerard Woodward's I'll Go to Bed at Noon, a gentle if often angry domestic saga of no pretention but immense feeling. This is his second novel, following the underrated August, a book that did not set out to subvert fiction but certainly caught emotion. It is overly long and often approaches melodrama, but it is human and considering that inferior English novels such as Nicholas Shakespeare's appalling Snowleg, Matt Thorne's crude sex romp Cherry and Louise Dean's airport read debut, Becoming Strangers, were also longlisted, it is a relief that Woodward's dourly honest narrative, a sequel to August, won the final berth.
All in all, literary merit and art, rather than patriotoic zeal demand that Colm Tóibín's The Master emerges as victor of a shortlist best described as oddly low key.
